Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

With an extensive set of features and intuitive interface, Teamwork Projects is one of the best services for managing projects.

21 Jun 2019

Project management is so complex that you can spend two years getting a master's degree in the subject. With Teamwork Projects, one of our top-rated project management apps, it doesn't feel that complicated. This excellent online platform eases many of the pains of project management by giving team members a clear interface with all the necessary tools to manage projects, keep an eye on people's time, bill clients, and more. Teamwork Projects is an Editors' Choice project management app, alongside Zoho Projects and LiquidPlanner.

Teamwork Projects Pricing

Teamwork Projects has four account types: Free Forever, Pro, Premium, and Enterprise. When you sign up for an account, you automatically get a 30-day trial of the Premium service with no credit card required.

To get a Free Forever account, you must sign up for the service, start the Premium trial, and then "cancel" Premium to downgrade it to the tier you want. The free account lets five people to manage two projects at a time, with 100MB of storage space for files. You can invite as many external collaborators as you like. You get most of the features that come with the other account types, but no webhooks, two-factor authentication, or integrations with other services.

The Pro account costs $11.25 per person per month or $108 per person per year. Teamwork Projects requires a minimum of five people, however, so the actual starting cost is either $56.25 per month or $540 per year, plus more for every additional team member. The Pro account increases the file storage to 100GB. You can have up to 50 people and 300 projects. You also get webhooks and integration options for Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive (Personal), and Slack.

The Premium service costs $18.75 per person per month or $180 per person when paying annually. Again, you must pay for a minimum of 5 people, so the true starting cost is either $93.75 per month or $900 per year. With a Premium account, you get everything in Pro, and your limits increase to 100 people, 600 projects, and 250GB of storage. This plan also adds a Project Portfolio feature, two-factor authentication, a custom domain with SSL, and additional integration options (Microsoft Office, OneDrive Business, Connectors, and Project; HubSpot; and SharePoint).

For teams of 100 people or more, you can contact Teamwork (the company) for information and a price quote about its Enterprise Account. This plan provides more storage space, unlimited team members and projects, premium support, an enterprise-level API, a dedicated account manager for advanced onboarding and training, and additional controls for branding.

It's difficult to compare the prices of project management apps because some charge a per-person-per-month fee while others charge a flat fee for a certain number of users. When you break it down, however, a ballpark figure for mid to high tiers of service with the best project management app is $30-$45 per person per month. Based on this number, Teamwork Projects' prices are competitive. Additionally, its free plan is generous.

Getting Started With Teamwork Projects

Teamwork Projects makes it easy to set up an account and start entering details about a project right away. Some project management apps make it more difficult because they use unconventional terminology for their features or hide settings you need in places you might not look. Teamwork Projects doesn't. It's one of the most intuitive project management tools we've seen. Within minutes of creating an account, we had set up a project, invited collaborators, entered a list of milestones, and began adding tasks.

The app has a fresh and smart design. It's perky while still being professional, with a color theme that you can customize, and it uses space appropriately. This all makes for a visually inviting app. Navigation couldn't be more intuitive. It's always apparent where you need to go to see a list of projects, assign a task to a particular person, change someone's permission levels, add details to a task, spin out a report, or launch a timer to track time on task.

As easy as it is to navigate and use the app, Teamwork Projects is by no means simplistic. Its feature set is deep. For instance, when creating tasks, you can add subtasks, create task dependencies, indicate priority levels, define a due date or timespan for the task, and assign it to more than one person. It's missing the ability to assign a time that task is due (you can only set the date), but, otherwise, the options are plentiful.

You can customize your Teamwork Projects account to brand it with your company's identity. Every account gets a unique URL for logging in, and you can optionally add a logo, too. Additionally, you can access lower level customizations and settings such as those related to webhooks, single sign-on (SSO), and your subscription details.

Features

As you and your team populate Teamwork Projects with projects and associated details, you see a dashboard fill in with information, too. The dashboard contains several graphs and info boxes that tell you about the state of your projects. For example, it can show team administrators the number of tasks due soon across all projects, how many active tasks are assigned to different team members, how much time the team has spent on tasks lately, and how many of those hours are billable. For individuals who don't have administrative privileges, they see information pertinent to them, such as upcoming tasks and milestones, time logged, and active tasks assigned to them.

Speaking of time logged, Teamwork Projects comes with time-tracking and billing features, including an in-app timer you can launch while you work. If you don't track your time as you work, you can always add the number of hours or minutes worked manually. Teamwork Projects allows you to enter additional details, such as a description of the work, relevant tasks, and even tags. You can also mark time entries as billable or non-billable.

Teamwork Projects includes expenses and invoicing tools, too. Most of these features live under a header called Billing. When you incur expenses that should be charged to a client, you can add them in this area and include a name, date, and description. From this section, you can also select all billable time and expenses and automatically generate an invoice. You can also create a flat fee invoice here. Teamwork Projects keeps track of the invoices you generate and the expenses you bill so that you don't double bill anyone.

The app also has interactive Gantt charts, so you can adjust the timeline of a project by dragging and dropping the affected tasks. You can also edit most other important details. For example, you can create dependencies among tasks, log progress on a task by noting its percent toward completion, reassign it to someone else, change the priority level, and so forth. However, the Gantt charts' grid-like views feel tight and are inconsistent with the app's otherwise inviting design.

If you love Gantt charts and are deep into time management and time tracking, you might find LiquidPlanner more appealing. In LiquidPlanner, you can see on a Gantt chart how someone's unexpected absence or extended leave will affect a project's progress, and you can instantly adjust the entire project schedule accordingly. Comindware Project has many similar features but doesn't put time-management at the fore as much as LiquidPlanner does.

Teamwork Projects also includes optional kanban boards. Kanban is a method of managing work. You have a board with a series of vertical columns, and you have cards. Each card is a task. You can label the columns however you like, although often people use them to track work through a workflow, such as To Do, Doing, Done. Then you move a card from across the columns as it advances through the workflow.

The way Teamwork Projects implements kanban is a little unusual, but in a neat way. Normally, when project management apps have kanban boards (and it's rare that they do), the columns of the board match some field that's already in the task details, that is, you choose column headers from some existing field. In Teamwork Projects, however, your kanban board can be completely disconnected from existing information about the project and tasks. You can make a fresh kanban board to visualize whatever information you want. For example, in our demo account, we created a kanban board for tracking task status: To Be Assigned, Assigned, In Progress, Waiting Signoff. These options do not appear anywhere in the task details. They're completely separate. Because you customize the kanban board any way you like, you have an opportunity to do something novel with your project that isn't inherently supported in the app.

Within the Board view, Teamwork Projects has another very cool feature called Triggers. Triggers are automations you create so that when someone moves a task card into a certain column, some specified action happens automatically. For example, let's say we have a column called Awaiting Approval. You can create a Trigger such that any time a card lands in this column, the group manager and anyone following the task receives notification that the work is ready to be approved. Note that triggers are not available in the free plan.

Integrations and Webhooks

Teamwork Projects supports webhooks, which is a slightly advanced feature that allows you to create automations with online services that are external to Teamwork Projects. For example, you could create a webhook that sends an email to the executive team anytime someone marks a milestone complete. For a webhook to work, you need the connected service to support webhooks, too.

Another way you can use webhooks is to collect custom information about how your team uses Teamwork Projects. You could, for example, develop a webhook that logs the time, date, and user whenever someone downloads a file from your team's account. Note that Webhooks require you to dive into the API a bit, so some users may want to opt for other integrations instead.

On that front, Teamwork Projects supports plenty of integrated services, including ZenDesk, FreshBooks, Harvest, and Zapier. Zapier opens up even more connectivity, as it's a service that assists people in making automations among apps that don't necessarily connect on their own. For example, you can use Zapier to connect Teamwork Projects to Salesforce such that when someone creates a new sales opportunity in Salesforce, a new task automatically appears in Teamwork Projects that pulls in whatever information you want from the new sales opportunity.

Collaboration in Teamwork Projects

For a brief period of time, project management apps and other work-management apps began adding chat functionality so that you could message colleagues without leaving the active window where you're working. That trend has slowed as team messaging apps have become more popular. Teamwork in fact offers a messaging app for teams called Teamwork Chat, but it's a product that's sold separately from Teamwork Projects. The two apps can integrate with one another, so if you like Teamwork Projects, you might consider adding Teamwork Chat.

The company has other collaboration products, too, such as a CRM, help desk software, and a collaborative document editing app called Teamwork Spaces that's somewhat similar to Quip from Salesforce. All these apps can integrate with one another.

A few project management services still offer a fully incorporated chat app, if you're looking for one. Zoho Projects and ProofHub are two examples.

As much as Teamwork Projects foster working together, it's not ideal for certain kinds of collaboration. For example, you can upload files to the app, preview them, and even add comments. You can't, however, mark up the files using arrows and circles or a highlighter tool, which is a setback if your team collaborates frequently on visual materials.

If you need markup tools in your collaboration app, you might search for proofing software specifically, or seek out a project management app that contains it, such as ProofHub. Volerro is another option, although it's more of a kanban board app than traditionally project management software. Igloo is yet another option, but it's more of a workplace collaboration space (think intranet) than a project management platform. It has PDF markup tools as well as a star-ratings option for all uploaded files.

Despite those limitations, Teamwork Projects does let you add descriptions to files, categorize them, and choose who should be notified of its upload. You can even restrict access to a file if you do not want everyone in the account to see it.

If you have teammates who are often on the go, Teamwork Projects has an app for both iOS and Android, letting everyone stay up to date on projects and tasks no matter where they are. The mobile version of Teamwork Projects gives you insight into the status of work and timelines but doesn't have every single bit of functionality that comes in the web app. So it's useful for staying in touch with your team by updating your status or adding hours worked on a task, but it's by no means a replacement to the web app.

Project Management Made Simple

Teamwork Projects provides excellent project management support, with a wide range of tools, an easy-to-use design, and useful features. Its flat rate covers five users, and its competitive prices make it a good value, given what it offers. Teamwork Projects remains a PCMag Editors' Choice alongside Zoho Projects and LiquidPlanner. Zoho Projects continues to appeal to small businesses on a budget, while LiquidPlanner is ideal for larger organizations that are willing to put in the time to learn an incredibly productive system.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, … See Full Bio